-- This collection of satellite images was originally produced on March 14, 2011, days after the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan. The known death toll came to 15,848 with 3,305 missing. The tsunami also inundated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant causing a series of failures that led to the world's largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
The above photos show Yuriage in Natori (top); and Yagawahama (bottom) -- both are in Miyagi prefecture.
PHOTOS: Top Five Cities on Faults

Google Crisis Response Team; Google, GeoEye,

View Caption+#2: Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant

Image taken in 2004.

Google

View Caption+#3: Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant

Image from March 12, 2011 (before outer shell collapse).

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View Caption+#4: Industrial Site Just South of Fukushima I Power Plant

Image taken in 2004.

Google

View Caption+#5: Industrial Site Just South of Fukushima I Power Plant

Image from March 12, 2011.
ANALYSIS: Japan, One Year Later: In the Radiation Zone

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View Caption+#6: Village Two Miles South of Fukushima I Power Plant

Image taken in 2004.

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View Caption+#7: Village Two Miles South of Fukushima I Power Plant

Image from March 12, 2011.

View Caption+#8: Fukushima II Power Plant

Image taken in 2004. Fukushima II Power Plant is located about 7 miles south of the Fukushima I Power Plant.

A radioactive plume of water in the Pacific Ocean from Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which was crippled in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, will likely reach U.S. coastal waters starting in 2014, according to a new study. The long journey of the radioactive particles could help researchers better understand how the ocean’s currents circulate around the world.

Ocean simulations showed that the plume of radioactive cesium-137 released by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 could begin flowing into U.S. coastal waters starting in early 2014 and peak in 2016. Luckily, two ocean currents off the eastern coast of Japan — the Kuroshio Current and the Kuroshio Extension — would have diluted the radioactive material so that its concentration fell well below the World Health Organization’s safety levels within four months of the Fukushima incident. But it could have been a different story if nuclear disaster struck on the other side of Japan.

“The environmental impact could have been worse if the contaminated water would have been released in another oceanic environment in which the circulation was less energetic and turbulent,” said Vincent Rossi, an oceanographer and postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Spain.

Fukushima’s radioactive water release has taken its time journeying across the Pacific. By comparison, atmospheric radiation from the Fukushima plant began reaching the U.S. West Coast within just days of the disaster back in 2011. (Fukushima Radiation Leak: 5 Things You Should Know)

Tracking radioactivity’s path

The radioactive plume has three different sources: radioactive particles falling out from the atmosphere into the ocean, contaminated water directly released from the plant, and water that became contaminated by leaching radioactive particles from tainted soil.

The release of cesium-137 from Fukushima in Japan’s more turbulent eastern currents means the radioactive material is diluted to the point of posing little threat to humans by the time it leaves Japan’s coastal waters. Rossi worked with former colleagues at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Australia to simulate the spread of Fukushima’s radioactivity in the oceans —--dy detailed in the October issue of the journal Deep-Sea Research Part 1.

Researchers averaged 27 experimental runs of their model -- each run starting in a different year -- to ensure that the simulated spread of the cesium-137 as a "tracer" was not unusually affected by initial ocean conditions. Many oceanographers studying the ocean’s currents prefer using cesium-137 to track the ocean currents because it acts as a passive tracer in seawater, meaning it doesn't interact much with other things, and decays slowly with a long half-life of 30 years.